Open Access – still to have its Google moment : Publishing Technology

"Jump forward to 2016, and web exploration in the US and Europe is dominated by Google/ Google Scholar, Bing and to a lesser degree Yahoo – all basing searches on indexing and crawling, and all performing three basic tasks: [1]Searching the Internet on the basis of keywords [2] Maintaining an index of the words they find, and where they find them [3]Allowing users to look for words or word combinations found in that index As searches are centred on words – and not IP licence type, a problem is immediately created for providers of Open Access content. Ask any Open Access publisher, and they will tell you that one of their biggest challenges – if not the biggest – is discoverability. And here the most popular search engines are only partially helpful ..."